Be My Bad Boy, Be My Man
Mar. 13th, 2009 11:02 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lokifanLet’s talk about bad boys. Specifically, bad boys in Harry Potter.
We’ve all come across Draco being referred to as ‘the bad boy’ – usually by gushy journalists in badfic, but whatever. There is an idea that Draco Malfoy is a Bad Boy. There’s even more an idea that Lucius Malfoy’s Bad, Real Bad. Where does this come from?
Interesting question, but it might make more sense to think about what makes a bad boy bad.
The original Bad Boy is probably James Dean (although you could make an argument and a half for Heathcliff, despite his puppy-torturing bastardy). Certainly James Dean is a quintessentially modern Bad Boy: he is also the hero, and the love interest, and the one the Youf audience is meant to identify with. His Badness is part of his appeal.
It’s obvious that a great deal of the Bad Boy’s appeal is that he’s a rebel (with or without a cause). He flaunts authority, he talks back, he probably smokes. (Until the British government gets its Photoshopping claws into him, anyway.) That’s part of why the Bad Boy is such a teenage phenomenon. Most people want to be rebels; basically every teenager wants to be a rebel. And the Bad Boy flounts authority because he just doesn’t care, but the authority can’t be anybody the audience/reader particularly likes. So we have the Ministry, or the vice-principal, or the chief constable. (Watch me flit between genres and countries! I am a meta NINJA!) People who usually have no evil motive in mind – who might even be heroes of a sort. But they’re administrative types, who don’t understand the real world, or want to constrain the Bad Boy’s freedom. So he goes all smart-alec then walks the street. He’s a rebel, yo.
Of course, rebelling has consequences – such as scarring on your hand, or losing your badge, or getting grounded. So in some cases we want to be the rebel’s friend. We’re still cool, but we don’t pay the price. We’re Molly Ringwald.
Having said all that – and I’m aware that I’m probably missing things – I want to add that I have no idea why Draco Malfoy would ever be considered a Bad Boy.
He obviously doesn’t support Dumbledore, or the main ethos of Hogwarts. That makes him a rebel of a sort. But he doesn’t say anything about it – not directly, with a sneer, as would designate him a Bad Boy.
Besides, Dumbledore and (most of) his staff are coded as rebels themselves. They’re fighting the oppressive force of the Ministry, with its evil forces that want him to not hire terrible teachers (it’s oppression I tell you! OPPRESSION! *hugs Hagrid*) and think that sending eleven-year-olds into the Forbidden Forest is a bad plan. They are the rebels. Pureblood Draco, with his father who’s personal friends with the Minister and has contacts at the only respected newspaper, stands for the established order and its prejudice. He might act nouveau riche, but Draco is the sneering aristocrat who’s defeated by the scholarship boy.
It actually pains me to write that, because although genre conventions show that we’re meant to interpret the story that way, there’s not much to support it. Harry is famous and (sometimes) loved, he has a small fortune, he gets onto the Quidditch team and has a broomstick when Draco is denied that. Draco is allowed a better broomstick for a while as a sign of his corruption, but then Harry gets a better one because he deserves it. Admittedly Harry’s an orphan while Draco has a supportive family, and his popularity sometimes drops; but by halfway through Philosopher’s Stone Harry is more of an overdog. Joren from the Protector of the Small quartet is how ‘sneering, aristocratic white-blond bully with all the advantages’ is done; Kel, who arrives to find her room ransacked, is despised by many of her fellow pupils and is disapproved of by her main teacher is an actual underdog.
But Harry is considered the underdog hero by the author, and it’s got to be said that he’s far more the typical Bad Boy than Draco could ever be. Draco has no revolutionary instincts. Look at Goblet of Fire, the one book where Draco has something close to a Bad Boy moment. You’re faced with a teacher who’s a personal friend of the headteacher who’s repeatedly humiliated your house, a teacher considered epically cool by all the students, a teacher who’s made it clear he wants to bring your daddy down for the hate crimes he got away with. This teacher has turned you into a rodent and bounced you up and down against stone. Nobody did anything to protect you while you were “squealing in pain”. He turns you back when forced to by another teacher. (McGonagall = win.) What do you do?
You get up immediately with only a wince and mutter a threat.
Okay, he threatens to run to his daddy, but I for one applauded! That was gleeful child abuse, but Draco got up despite what must have been some serious pain, and told him off. Go Draco! Snark at that disguised Death Eater! Enjoy your fourteen-year-old-heartthrob status! I guarantee girls all over Hogwarts swooned at that story.
Draco does have his moments, and I know I’m not the only one who likes him largely because he’s squished so constantly, but keeps getting up to be spiteful. But his fighting spirit is expressed through his ability to use other people’s agendas for his own benefit. He and Snape make Harry’s Potions classes miserable. Scandalous details of Harry’s life are exposed by Rita Skeeter. Umbridge’s Inquisitorial Squad attack the DA. Draco certainly does things off his own bat, and insults Harry to his face. But he works with the system. The enemies of his enemies are his friends.
You wanna know who the real Bad Boy is? It’s Harry.
Harry isn’t actually Bad, admittedly. (Ignore the occasional sadism for the purposes of this, plz.) And Draco is a minor villain. An antagonist who’s not pure evil usually does fulfil the Bad Boy role, which is surely part of why fandom tends to put Draco there: genre convention puts him with the Spikes, the Rupert of Mentzaus, the Lestats, the Captain Johns of this world. (Yes, I’m putting him with some characters who shag the hero. No, I’m not admitting to an agenda.) But Draco’s badness is of totally the wrong type for him to fit that trope. Don’t forget, he supported Umbridge, an example of bureaucratic sadism if there ever was one. Draco is the Captain of the Hitler Youth. He “sucks up to Snape”. (Stop giggling in the back!) Draco’s unlikeability and evil come from the fact that he is part of the corrupt old order, not from a desire to destroy or wanting to overthrow a good authority.
Harry, by contrast, is a rebel. He snarks at two consecutive Ministers. He snarks at Snape. He snarks at Umbridge. Mockery is his weapon of choice, and those with power are his targets. (And Draco.) He’s friends with oddballs, by the end of OotP at least. Actually, OotP really makes my point for me. He’s committed a crime! He yells at people! He hates authority! Presumably the scene where he smokes Gillyweed and reads the Socialist Worker was cut by the editor. (No, wait, that would suggest OotP had an editor.) The side of me that likes bad boys – which, tbh, is mostly superseded by my thing for bad girls, because nobody will ever be as sexy as Faith – likes Harry and his “you don’t have to call me sir, Professor.”
Harry’s a teenage rebel against the classic things: his family, his school, his government. And he has the Bad Boy of other genres sewn up too: Scrimgeour as the cop who doesn’t get it, Harry as the detective who’ll do whatever it takes to catch Mad Tom Riddle, the serial killer who just won’t stop. This is definitely a boy with rebel instincts and distrust for authority. Natural enough, considering his childhood.
This is already horrifyingly long, but I just want to mention Lucius. Him I find more understandable – he’s not cited as a Bad Boy exactly, but as Bad, Real Bad. The genre conventions set him up as a smooth villain who half-seduces the virginal heroine. Actually, considering the child-abuse connotations of CoS, you could argue he does that by proxy.
I guess he’s the best candidate for it. He has his moments of smooth evil – I’d cite the moment in OotP where he’s standing with the Minister and smiling, having last been seen laughing while Harry was tortured. But oh my God, he’s so nouveau riche!
The whole ‘Dumbledore v Malfoys down the ages’ in Beedle the Bard was hilarious, but to me it kind of made no sense. Narcissa Malfoy is a classic aristocratic lady, but Lucius as old money? No way. He has a brawl in a bookshop! Lucius is not cool and calm unless he’s getting his way. He’s a passable smooth villain in Hagrid’s hut, telling Dumbledore he’s been suspended. Under pressure (for instance, being snarked at by a twelve-year-old) he starts to lose his temper. Under real pressure, he relies on Narcissa’s support, and is less smooth than ever. Understandable, but really. Narcissa is slicker than he is! That’s partly because Narcissa’s awesome, but if your wife comes from a family full of Victorian consumptives having operatic tantrums and she’s still cooler under pressure, you do not get to claim Smooth Villain as your generic role.
This brings me neatly to my last point. The real way to tell who the Bad Boy is, is to check who’s getting the chicks. The Bad Boy gets the Spunky Redheaded Heroine. (Re: James Potter and Lily Evans, Locke Lamora and Sabetha, George Cooper and Alanna, Bender and Claire, nearly-Dallas Winston and Cherry.) Voila!
The real Bad Boys of the series, I’d say, are James and Sirius and Fred and George. Sadistic pranksters who rebel carelessly but are still good at heart. (Hmph. James and Sirius I’ll agree with as good at heart, but the Weasley twins are just nasty.) The admittedly glorious, if massively poserish, moment where the twins leave school forever showcases that perfectly.
So what do you guys think? Is it viable to consider Draco a Bad Boy? Does that fit in with sympathetic interpretations – do you have to think Draco’s an underdog to think he’s a Bad Boy? What about Harry? Is he still a Bad Boy if he revolutionises the Ministry or whatever, as JKR has said happens later, or does the Bad Boy have to be an outsider? I think Bad Boys have to be basically on the ‘right’ side according to the narrator, but I have seen exceptions. Any other examples of Bad Boys who fudge the genre lines?
I think Neville’s a Bad Boy by the end of the series, but that’s mainly because of his mighty weapon. *snerk*
We’ve all come across Draco being referred to as ‘the bad boy’ – usually by gushy journalists in badfic, but whatever. There is an idea that Draco Malfoy is a Bad Boy. There’s even more an idea that Lucius Malfoy’s Bad, Real Bad. Where does this come from?
Interesting question, but it might make more sense to think about what makes a bad boy bad.
The original Bad Boy is probably James Dean (although you could make an argument and a half for Heathcliff, despite his puppy-torturing bastardy). Certainly James Dean is a quintessentially modern Bad Boy: he is also the hero, and the love interest, and the one the Youf audience is meant to identify with. His Badness is part of his appeal.
It’s obvious that a great deal of the Bad Boy’s appeal is that he’s a rebel (with or without a cause). He flaunts authority, he talks back, he probably smokes. (Until the British government gets its Photoshopping claws into him, anyway.) That’s part of why the Bad Boy is such a teenage phenomenon. Most people want to be rebels; basically every teenager wants to be a rebel. And the Bad Boy flounts authority because he just doesn’t care, but the authority can’t be anybody the audience/reader particularly likes. So we have the Ministry, or the vice-principal, or the chief constable. (Watch me flit between genres and countries! I am a meta NINJA!) People who usually have no evil motive in mind – who might even be heroes of a sort. But they’re administrative types, who don’t understand the real world, or want to constrain the Bad Boy’s freedom. So he goes all smart-alec then walks the street. He’s a rebel, yo.
Of course, rebelling has consequences – such as scarring on your hand, or losing your badge, or getting grounded. So in some cases we want to be the rebel’s friend. We’re still cool, but we don’t pay the price. We’re Molly Ringwald.
Having said all that – and I’m aware that I’m probably missing things – I want to add that I have no idea why Draco Malfoy would ever be considered a Bad Boy.
He obviously doesn’t support Dumbledore, or the main ethos of Hogwarts. That makes him a rebel of a sort. But he doesn’t say anything about it – not directly, with a sneer, as would designate him a Bad Boy.
Besides, Dumbledore and (most of) his staff are coded as rebels themselves. They’re fighting the oppressive force of the Ministry, with its evil forces that want him to not hire terrible teachers (it’s oppression I tell you! OPPRESSION! *hugs Hagrid*) and think that sending eleven-year-olds into the Forbidden Forest is a bad plan. They are the rebels. Pureblood Draco, with his father who’s personal friends with the Minister and has contacts at the only respected newspaper, stands for the established order and its prejudice. He might act nouveau riche, but Draco is the sneering aristocrat who’s defeated by the scholarship boy.
It actually pains me to write that, because although genre conventions show that we’re meant to interpret the story that way, there’s not much to support it. Harry is famous and (sometimes) loved, he has a small fortune, he gets onto the Quidditch team and has a broomstick when Draco is denied that. Draco is allowed a better broomstick for a while as a sign of his corruption, but then Harry gets a better one because he deserves it. Admittedly Harry’s an orphan while Draco has a supportive family, and his popularity sometimes drops; but by halfway through Philosopher’s Stone Harry is more of an overdog. Joren from the Protector of the Small quartet is how ‘sneering, aristocratic white-blond bully with all the advantages’ is done; Kel, who arrives to find her room ransacked, is despised by many of her fellow pupils and is disapproved of by her main teacher is an actual underdog.
But Harry is considered the underdog hero by the author, and it’s got to be said that he’s far more the typical Bad Boy than Draco could ever be. Draco has no revolutionary instincts. Look at Goblet of Fire, the one book where Draco has something close to a Bad Boy moment. You’re faced with a teacher who’s a personal friend of the headteacher who’s repeatedly humiliated your house, a teacher considered epically cool by all the students, a teacher who’s made it clear he wants to bring your daddy down for the hate crimes he got away with. This teacher has turned you into a rodent and bounced you up and down against stone. Nobody did anything to protect you while you were “squealing in pain”. He turns you back when forced to by another teacher. (McGonagall = win.) What do you do?
You get up immediately with only a wince and mutter a threat.
Okay, he threatens to run to his daddy, but I for one applauded! That was gleeful child abuse, but Draco got up despite what must have been some serious pain, and told him off. Go Draco! Snark at that disguised Death Eater! Enjoy your fourteen-year-old-heartthrob status! I guarantee girls all over Hogwarts swooned at that story.
Draco does have his moments, and I know I’m not the only one who likes him largely because he’s squished so constantly, but keeps getting up to be spiteful. But his fighting spirit is expressed through his ability to use other people’s agendas for his own benefit. He and Snape make Harry’s Potions classes miserable. Scandalous details of Harry’s life are exposed by Rita Skeeter. Umbridge’s Inquisitorial Squad attack the DA. Draco certainly does things off his own bat, and insults Harry to his face. But he works with the system. The enemies of his enemies are his friends.
You wanna know who the real Bad Boy is? It’s Harry.
Harry isn’t actually Bad, admittedly. (Ignore the occasional sadism for the purposes of this, plz.) And Draco is a minor villain. An antagonist who’s not pure evil usually does fulfil the Bad Boy role, which is surely part of why fandom tends to put Draco there: genre convention puts him with the Spikes, the Rupert of Mentzaus, the Lestats, the Captain Johns of this world. (Yes, I’m putting him with some characters who shag the hero. No, I’m not admitting to an agenda.) But Draco’s badness is of totally the wrong type for him to fit that trope. Don’t forget, he supported Umbridge, an example of bureaucratic sadism if there ever was one. Draco is the Captain of the Hitler Youth. He “sucks up to Snape”. (Stop giggling in the back!) Draco’s unlikeability and evil come from the fact that he is part of the corrupt old order, not from a desire to destroy or wanting to overthrow a good authority.
Harry, by contrast, is a rebel. He snarks at two consecutive Ministers. He snarks at Snape. He snarks at Umbridge. Mockery is his weapon of choice, and those with power are his targets. (And Draco.) He’s friends with oddballs, by the end of OotP at least. Actually, OotP really makes my point for me. He’s committed a crime! He yells at people! He hates authority! Presumably the scene where he smokes Gillyweed and reads the Socialist Worker was cut by the editor. (No, wait, that would suggest OotP had an editor.) The side of me that likes bad boys – which, tbh, is mostly superseded by my thing for bad girls, because nobody will ever be as sexy as Faith – likes Harry and his “you don’t have to call me sir, Professor.”
Harry’s a teenage rebel against the classic things: his family, his school, his government. And he has the Bad Boy of other genres sewn up too: Scrimgeour as the cop who doesn’t get it, Harry as the detective who’ll do whatever it takes to catch Mad Tom Riddle, the serial killer who just won’t stop. This is definitely a boy with rebel instincts and distrust for authority. Natural enough, considering his childhood.
This is already horrifyingly long, but I just want to mention Lucius. Him I find more understandable – he’s not cited as a Bad Boy exactly, but as Bad, Real Bad. The genre conventions set him up as a smooth villain who half-seduces the virginal heroine. Actually, considering the child-abuse connotations of CoS, you could argue he does that by proxy.
I guess he’s the best candidate for it. He has his moments of smooth evil – I’d cite the moment in OotP where he’s standing with the Minister and smiling, having last been seen laughing while Harry was tortured. But oh my God, he’s so nouveau riche!
The whole ‘Dumbledore v Malfoys down the ages’ in Beedle the Bard was hilarious, but to me it kind of made no sense. Narcissa Malfoy is a classic aristocratic lady, but Lucius as old money? No way. He has a brawl in a bookshop! Lucius is not cool and calm unless he’s getting his way. He’s a passable smooth villain in Hagrid’s hut, telling Dumbledore he’s been suspended. Under pressure (for instance, being snarked at by a twelve-year-old) he starts to lose his temper. Under real pressure, he relies on Narcissa’s support, and is less smooth than ever. Understandable, but really. Narcissa is slicker than he is! That’s partly because Narcissa’s awesome, but if your wife comes from a family full of Victorian consumptives having operatic tantrums and she’s still cooler under pressure, you do not get to claim Smooth Villain as your generic role.
This brings me neatly to my last point. The real way to tell who the Bad Boy is, is to check who’s getting the chicks. The Bad Boy gets the Spunky Redheaded Heroine. (Re: James Potter and Lily Evans, Locke Lamora and Sabetha, George Cooper and Alanna, Bender and Claire, nearly-Dallas Winston and Cherry.) Voila!
The real Bad Boys of the series, I’d say, are James and Sirius and Fred and George. Sadistic pranksters who rebel carelessly but are still good at heart. (Hmph. James and Sirius I’ll agree with as good at heart, but the Weasley twins are just nasty.) The admittedly glorious, if massively poserish, moment where the twins leave school forever showcases that perfectly.
So what do you guys think? Is it viable to consider Draco a Bad Boy? Does that fit in with sympathetic interpretations – do you have to think Draco’s an underdog to think he’s a Bad Boy? What about Harry? Is he still a Bad Boy if he revolutionises the Ministry or whatever, as JKR has said happens later, or does the Bad Boy have to be an outsider? I think Bad Boys have to be basically on the ‘right’ side according to the narrator, but I have seen exceptions. Any other examples of Bad Boys who fudge the genre lines?
I think Neville’s a Bad Boy by the end of the series, but that’s mainly because of his mighty weapon. *snerk*
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Date: 2009-03-13 11:07 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-03-14 05:29 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-03-13 11:44 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-03-14 05:35 am (UTC)If Harry isn't the consummate Bad Boy, he still deserves the title more than Draco.
Okay, see I could have posted that sentence and made the point in far fewer words, lol. Cos I don't think Harry is really a Bad Boy (like I said, James-and-Sirius are really the only ones who come close) but yeah. It particularly weirds me out in H/D fics when there's badboy!Draco. JKR has such a 'look at the cool rebels thing!' going on (and ohhh the critical meta I could write about that) and she'd never let her petty villains be rebels. Rebels are manly.
*cuddles Draco*
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Date: 2009-03-14 12:12 am (UTC)Presumably the scene where he smokes Gillyweed and reads the Socialist Worker was cut by the editor. (No, wait, that would suggest OotP had an editor.) OH SNAP YOU WENT THERE!
But I have this to say: I do not like fanon Draco, who is painted as either a leatherpants bad-ass sex-god OR a fastidious insatiable bottomy queen and I do not think that canon Draco is a classifiable "Bad Boy." I don't think that JKR gives Draco a big enough role in canon [minus HBP] for him to have a classifiable stereotype. If anything, he's that asshole rich jock in a bad teen movie, who is humiliated by the end of the film, while the nerd gets the girl [or something like that].
JKR doesn't want us to like Draco [hence her despair at all the Draco fangirling] and gives us plenty of reasons not to like him. Many people see Draco as a brat and a bully [which he is in canon], but I feel like there is so much more to him than just that. We only ever see things from Harry's POV and of course, all info is filtered from Harry, so we get his prejudices and judgments on the situation. I feel like there's so much more to Draco than him just being "the Bad Boy" or anything else like that. But we really don't get anything on his backstory in terms of his childhood, into why he developed into who he is. We can glean from canon that "precious Potter" drives him a bit over the edge into the bullying and snarkiness.
/rant
Sorry about that. *sheepish*
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Date: 2009-03-14 08:45 am (UTC)I don't like fanon!Draco either, really (except for
I think JKR does make Draco a recognisable stereotype - perhaps it's very English and not so recognisable? He's the posh aristocrat who bullies the scholarship boy. Think boy's boarding school books, and he is sooo typical of that. (Though like I said, I don't think Draco and Harry fit that bully/underdog vibe.)
Heh, and don't apologise! I completely agree with you on the rant. Draco's certainly a brat, although I'd even question whether he's as much of a bully as fandom tends to think - we only see him bully Neville, who gets attitude from everyone. Draco's nasty and snobbish, but his interaction with Harry isn't bully-and-victim at all - they're rivals.
Anyway, yes. We see Draco's worst moments - because everyone's at their worst around people they don't like - through the eyes of someone who already doesn't like him. Written by someone who wants us to dislike him. Poor boy. *fights narrative filter*
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Date: 2009-03-17 05:38 am (UTC)Art imitates life. Of course you don't get backstory -- if you got that, it means that you might sympathise with people you hate, and it could get very OOC, because you might imply you wanted to. I really wish those two had a better relationship so we could get that though, because I'd find that so interesting. But that's too OOC, too.
You want to distance yourself from that you hate. Sympathy begs closeness, and its enough that he got that for Snape with the Worst Memory scene. Closeness begs self-comparison, and if you get that for something you hate, you may hate yourself. Or something in tie with your past, as seen in canon. While all this is plausible, it's certainly not something JKR would want for her favourite character, or her storyline.
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Date: 2009-03-30 02:15 am (UTC)LOL. Depressingly, that's very true. Harry is massively discomfited by any self-comparison with people he dislikes - as most people are - and JKR was clearly unwilling to suggest nasty Draco and Harry have anything in common. Or worse still, that in some ways Draco is a better man.
Thinking about plausible, interesting ways Harry might have developed makes me sad. :( Particularly since we see shades of it, when he thinks of "the lost boys of Hogwarts", but of course by then Snape is dead, so Harry doesn't have to deal with him. Much easier to honour a memory than to forgive a living, sarcastic person.
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Date: 2009-03-14 12:23 am (UTC)If there's a wise-cracking, self-destructive don't-give-a-fuck badboy in the series then I'd say it was a young Sirius (though I've seen cases made for Charlie & the twins) 'cos I think a character has to be seriously flawed to constitute a badboy, which is why Faith is such a compelling one.
Anyway, the 'conventional hero who happens to be an outsider' has nothing to do with badboys in my view, but then I might just be biased 'cos I like my badboys (or badgirls) to be a whole lot darker and edgier.
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Date: 2009-03-14 05:54 am (UTC)Interesting. Badboy!Harry I tend to find ridiculous - I've seen a lot of summaries about how Harry comes back after the summer and is all thinking-for-himself and won't take Dumbledore's crap no more, and they elicit a similar reaction as the fics where Draco being considered 'the bad boy of Hogwarts' or w/e is apparently a fact of life. I think maybe you're right, that what I take as Bad Boy stuff (eg Harry Potter and the Umbridge Angst) is meant to be Heroic Outsider.
Anyway, the 'conventional hero who happens to be an outsider' has nothing to do with badboys in my view
Hmm. I think I agree with you, actually. But I find it hard to see Harry as an outsider - again, it's like underdog!Harry. Harry is popular and fanciable and has a crowd of outsiders around him, but he's still an angsty outcast? Oh dear, canon. Oh dear.
And yes, I like them a lot darker. *hugs Faith and runs away* But Harry does have his dark moments - crucio-ng Amycus, obv, but also 'LOL Umbridge is traumatised!' His attitude to teachers (who don't manipulate him. Ahem) IS quite Bad-Boy, and I think we're meant to take it as cool. Even if it's actually kind of sociopathic.
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Date: 2009-03-14 01:45 am (UTC)Get on MSN and talk to meeeeee. *is needy*
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Date: 2009-03-14 05:31 am (UTC)Heh. Aww, I feel bad now cos it's like four hours since you left this comment! *pets you*
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Date: 2009-03-14 04:16 pm (UTC)It might be that there is a definition problem with 'bad boy' in the first place. It sounds like a mixture between 'rebel' and 'bad guy', and Draco falls between both because he's definitely not cut out to be the former, but too young and, really, not downright independently 'evil' enough to fit the second. He's bad (as in, nasty little menace until he halfway catches on at the series' end) and he's a boy throughout, so...
But I don't think he's a rebel, because (one moment on the tower aside) he never stands up to rebel - he's afraid of authorities, and basically a conformist of sorts, clinging to the powers-that-are ('father', Voldemort, Slytherin...) to gain influence. Pretty much everything that Harry goes up against.
*And* I totally agree with your Lucius, but for me, it's exactly his failure at being the smooth villain (while *trying* to be the smooth villain, if that makes sense) which makes him such fun.
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Date: 2010-01-25 12:32 pm (UTC)*nodnod* He's absolutely a conformist, clinging to the powers-that-be and trusting them in a way Harry rarely does. (Which is part of why post-DH!Draco is so interesting.) The difficulty of defining a bad boy might well explain part of why Draco gets described as a 'bad boy' - I like that idea.
:) Entirely agreed on Lucius. Silly man.
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Date: 2009-03-15 04:06 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-03-16 08:39 pm (UTC)I've always felt that both Draco and Harry are often misunderstood characters
Definitely. And actually I can see a connection there between sort-of-Bad-Boy!Harry and dominant!Harry - Draco grows up with benevolent authority that wants the best for him, even if Daddy was probably a bit distant. Harry doesn't trust authority at all. (Unless it's Dumbledore, and imo that's because Dumbledore is a master manipulator.)
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Date: 2009-03-17 04:50 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-03-16 03:07 am (UTC)With a fandom as diverse and dedicated as the HP fandom, we are bound to end up with a fanon that is very different from cannon, because everyone expresses their preferences. Draco, like Snape, is a reserved person - they rarely express their distaste of anything too openly.
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Date: 2009-03-16 08:45 pm (UTC)LOL. I'm sure you're right - I just wonder why they'd pick Draco for that. But then it's a very different mindset from mine, since I like Draco partly because he loses all the time.
Draco, like Snape, is a reserved person - they rarely express their distaste of anything too openly.
We are a very diverse fandom - allow me to prove it by asking about your opinion of a character! Draco's reserved? I'd challenge that. Draco can pretend emotion occasionally but I think he tends to show his distaste very openly. He talks back to Hagrid, for instance. And obviously he never makes the slightest attempt to hide his distate for Harry, even though Lucius tells him it's unwise "to appear less than fond of Harry Potter".
no subject
Date: 2009-03-16 07:07 pm (UTC)I am still amazed how unwilling people are to classify Draco as mainly a comedic relief antagonist.. IMO he should be classified with the Gaston and Le Fous, Remy Bucksaplentys (honestly HE IS REMY BUCKSAPLENTY except Draco's parents give him too much attention rather than too little), and the Robotniks. Oh, and Lucius should be classified as that too. HE GOT DRUNK AT THE WORLD CUP AND WENT MUGGLE TWIRLING lmao cmonnn. He gets hit in the face a lot too.
Narcissa's behaviour in Madam Malkins is just as nouveau riche and improper as Lucius's behavior in Flourish and Blotts, it's just that Lucius got in a physical altercation afterwards lol. But yes, she is more put together and graceful than the men about it lol.
And guuurl I gotta say I find it so so amusing when people who like Draco are repelled by the Weasley twins because "they're nasty" x).
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Date: 2009-03-16 08:36 pm (UTC)Same - or that he wanted to, anyway. But he didn't.
And I dunno. Draco definitely serves as comic relief, but Harry always takes him seriously, even before the HBP train scene that was obviously meant to show Draco actually winning for once. And I think the reader's meant to take him seriously too. Like I said, Draco always loses, but he's not just there for comedy. (Although he is so very ineffectual. *cuddles him*) Besides, I said genre convention puts him with characters that are Bad Boys, but the point was that I don't think Draco has much in common with Rupert or Lestat.
Lucius... GOT DRUNK AT THE WORLD CUP AND WENT MUGGLE TWIRLING lmao cmonnn
Lucius is totally LOLworthy but that was a torture scene! I know Lucius ended up running away from the Dark Mark and being generally inept, but imo that's one of his less pathetic moments.
Good point about Flourish and Blotts. Although Narcissa pwn3d everyone in that scene. *hearts Narcissa*
I gotta say I find it so so amusing when people who like Draco are repelled by the Weasley twins because "they're nasty"
PFFT I am completely unrepentant. At least Draco nearly kills people because his life is being threatened, rather than because they're from the rival house and took house points.
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Date: 2009-03-16 10:17 pm (UTC)Ahhh sorry I totally said "the only time Draco can be taken seriously" thing wrong- my mind was omitting book 6, because it should be a given that Draco should be taken seriously (for the most part) throughout the book.
I don't think Harry takes Draco too seriously except in book 6, where it is warranted. Plus, Draco is basically a smarter Dudley, who Harry had had to put up with all of his childhood.. it wouldn't surprise me at all that Harry dosen't find anything funny about thinking you're leaving a world of douchery for a world of magic when SURPRISE there is a douche waiting for you here too.
I think Lucius's shenanigans at the Cup were pretty pathetic- it was typical bullying (though truthfully bullying can be qualified as a kind of torture). We never hear that the muggles we're killed or permanently injured or Crucioed (not saying Lucius wouldn't ever do that, but I don't think he did at the time). But I mean, I DO think that Lucius is supposed to be genuinely threatening at times, but there are other times where he is just an annoying antagonist that is there to be beat up on for lulz, like Draco is.
Whennn did the Weasleys try to kill anybody x). The Weasleys play pranks on people because they're asshats, and Draco is mean to people he dosen't even know because of their race/blood whatever. Who is the nastier one again??
Oh and I never said THANK YOU OMG for arguing that Draco is not a bad boy x). It's always refreshing to hear that from H/D fans. I however am arguing even further because I have been missing good Malfoy meta ;_;.
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Date: 2009-03-27 11:06 am (UTC)The twins shoved Marcus Flint into a cabinet and left him there, knowing he didn't come out of it for quite some time and didn't care. When he eventually DID come out he suffered brain damage. So yes, presumably they didn't put him in in order to kill him, but didn't care if it killed him. And their reason for doing so was he had been trying to take house points, no physical danger for anyone involved.
x).Draco is mean to people he dosen't even know because of their race/blood whatever.
The twins hiss and boo at firsties just because they were sorted into Slytherin house.
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Date: 2009-03-30 02:42 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-03-30 11:59 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-01-25 12:50 pm (UTC)I don't think Harry takes Draco too seriously except in book 6, where it is warranted.
He does think Draco's the heir of Slytherin, though. I think Harry takes too Draco seriously before Book 6, since Draco is made of fail villainy-wise - but I think he does tend to consider Draco a threat.
The Weasley twins shoved Montague into the cabinet - and he didn't die, but that was clearly due to his skill and luck. So I think they're nastier; Draco's carelessly mean but he's never given anyone brain damage.
:) I DO NOT understand bad-boy!Draco at all. Draco fails! So much! It's why I like him, that he just gets squished OVER and OVER but never stops trying.
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Date: 2009-03-17 05:54 am (UTC)As for the Bad Boy thing, I never really considered being bad as "being a rebel". That's just one section of it. Ok, so you proved Draco's not the real hero of the books. We all knew that. But I define being bad as doing what you shouldn't do. Whether Draco does that, though, is up for debate.
I also agree with you that Draco is by no means tough (I believe the term is "Daddy's boy"). And I certainly hate the name for Dramione, "Leather and Libraries" because that is so far from who Draco is, its disturbing. But he certainly plays the field, and is a bully. I wouldn't call him a Bad Boy per se, but it does seem some level of bad. Plus look at all he's done before the Lightning-Struck Tower in HBP. And Lucius is even worse. It's not like their side, however unrebel-like, is innocent in itself.
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Date: 2009-03-27 11:28 am (UTC)- canon does not deal with sex. Hence, we don't know what our boys get up to, meaning writers are free to imagine all kinds of things without directly contradicting canon. As you point out, it'd be hard to make a case for Draco being a bad boy just based on the things we do know about him - you'd really have to go over the books with a toothbrush to collect the necessary evidence for it. Whereas there is no saying what he might have been doing off-screen.
- Draco's canonical "femininity". Bad boys need a certain level of aggression, of toughness, of psychological independence that enables them to go through with their agenda and suck up the consequences. Like Harry did when provoking Umbridge more than once in spite of the torture than ensued. These traits are seen as "male", genderwise (it's no coincidence that in H/D Harry usually tops and Draco bottoms). The way Draco is described in canon, he is coded as feminine. IMO, that's another case of the author venting her misogyny combined with middle class aversion to "effeminate aristocracy", but it is definitly there. And translates in fanfic into something of seductive homme fatale.
In short, I think fandom's take on Draco-as-bad-boy is sexual by default: sexual activity IS part of a traditional bad boy (Sirius! - BTW, that's one point that actually argues against Harry as bad boy who "gets the girl" but never seems overly interested in her apart from just that), there are hints at Draco being both attractive and active - and nothing to contradict it.
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Date: 2010-01-20 06:48 pm (UTC)Any badboy fic makes me cringe. I cannot read them! They are rather silly, and at times, I feel as though Harry is the greatest upholder of authority of them all. Every time he breaks a rule, he does it for a greater purpose, not for his own selfishness (which is generally why a badboy would break the rules). When he used the time turner, he did it to help Buckbeak. If anything, Harry is used as a symbol of using questionable means to achieve righteous ends, which always made me feel as though he was a bit of a 'preachy' character. I'm not saying he was written to be perfect, but his despite his flaws, I always felt like he was meant to be a more moralistic character, while Draco acted as his shadow and a foil sometimes to contract Harry's morality (and his poor decisions, which represented his immorality) to show the true path. It doesn't help that he had rather illustrious nicknames, like the 'Golden Boy' and 'The Savior of the Wizarding World.' Lolwut.
Major sidenote: Also, Briar Moss = best badass. *swoon* (Though, The Will of the Empress made Briar a lot less awesome *sob*) Man, I really want to read up on The Circle Universe again. I miss it. :(
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Date: 2010-01-20 06:49 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-01-25 01:02 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-01-25 01:02 pm (UTC)I LOVE BRIAN SO MUCH. SO MUCH.